Press - Rough Draft Studios

Norman Bel Geddes and a streamlined aesthetic set the tone for Futurama, which imagines a Y3K Manhattan more complex than the city today.

Claudia Katz is the lead producer of Futurama at Rough Draft Studios, the firm Matt Groening selected to design and animate his latest cartoon. From her studio headquarters in Los Angeles, Katz told how she lends shape and humor to the future.

I.D.: Tell us about Futurama's production process.

Katz: The audio for the entire show is recorded before we begin animating, so we start with a tape, like an old radio show. The storyboards are done by hand. After we review them with the writers and make changes, we go into layout - establishing the key animation poses for each scene. Then we shoot an animatic, a limited story reel, and ship it to Korea where we have the cells painted and animated. The show gets passed through different crews of artists in our studio — 30 or so in all. From start to finish it takes about seven months of work to produce each episode.

I.D.: That's a huge amount of work for a half-hour of airtime.

Katz: The best — and worst — thing about Futurama from a production standpoint is that the environment for each episode is disposable. There's a limitless palette of things to do: We're always designing new societies and architecture that we'll never return to. The Simpsons, on the other hand, returns to the same kitchen, the same living room.

I.D.: How does one go about designing the future?

Katz: Very painfully. When we started the show last year we has met with Matt [Groening] many times and gone over references we thought were appropriate. Matt had a particular vision of how he wanted to stylize the show and make it more '30s and '40s pulp science fiction rather than Star Trekky [realism] — the kind of smooth-edge, so-called "streamlined" aesthetic you saw in Norman Bel Geddes buildings, in the car design of that era and in those old bubbly trains that looked like spaceships or submarines.

I.D.: So you try to integrate archaic inventions, obsolete, technologies and high-concept, futuristic design.

Katz: Right. We call it "high-tech/low-tech." Matt wanted this to be a future in which things don't necessarily do a great job — our machines are a reflection of ourselves.

I.D.: The future, according to your design, will retain everything that is baffling and inefficient about the present.

Katz: We have no choice but to define the future through things that exist now or through inventions that have a second incarnation. In New New York, the subway has been replaced by a pneumatic-tube system, which isn't a new idea but a new application. You can't make the future so alienating that the people watching it don't feel a part of it. Also, society has been wiped out a couple times [by aliens] so they're not necessarily a thousand years ahead.

I.D.: And the design can't be too refined because it would represent the dystopia.

Katz: Yes. If everything looked perfectly beautiful, it would defy what's really going on. Matt's a big advocate of just shoving antennas on rooftops and exposing all the observational detail really exists — ugly air-conditioning units, an old dumpster, a machine with springs popping out. You wouldn't want a clean aesthetic. New New York is just as much of a mess as old New York.

I.D.: So a computer in your future wouldn't be too elaborate design-wise. It would represent a more ambiguous concept?

Katz: In one episode a professor invents this alarm clock that, when you stick your finger in it, tells you exactly when you're going to die. It looks like a clock radio with a finger hole in the top. It would have to be an incredibly sophisticated thing if it could actually work, but we tried to make it a recognizable shape and put a futuristic spin on it.

I.D.: Humor must be a significant factor also. The design doesn't want to take itself too seriously.

Katz: Absolutely. Contrasts are always funny. For the professor to be building this huge desktop invention and come up with a little clock radio is much funnier that if he wheeled out a complicated apparatus.

We work closely with Matt on most designs that are instrumental to the story since they have so much to do with the humor. They play a big part in telling the joke. They have to be dead on.

I.D.: Did you decide to base Futurama in New York because the landscape is as conducive to humor as it is to futurism?

Katz: There was never any question that we would set Futurama in New York. It has more texture, more layered meaning and vertical chronology than any other place. And we can project into the future the important dilemmas of the present.

Trash disposal, for instance: They've been rocketing garbage into space because the landfills are full. The giant mass of waste is eventually going to boomerang back and demolish the city. There's also the frantic scurry for fashionable space: People put their bodies in storage and their brains in a box at a good address, preferably rent-controlled. Brains are shipped to the bodies when necessary. The elite exist on the Upper Upper West Side, which is floating above 86th Street. Zoning laws are so complicated that only a supercomputer can understand them.

I.D.: So ultimately, new New York is beset with complications that it pretends to resolve with futurism, but actually resolves with humor.

PRESS/NEWS